A Presbyterian minister interprets the ancient scriptures for a new day

Saturday, May 4, 2013

No Churches in the New City

Revelation
21:10, 22-22:5

Easter
6

May
5, 2013

William G. Carter

And in
the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy
city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God . . . I saw no
temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.

We
continue on our Easter journey through the book of Revelation, and are drawing
closer to the end. Our guide is the prophet John, who has a series of visions
on the little, rocky island of Patmos. It is the Lord’s Day, the day of
worship. If he had been worshiping with his congregation in the great city of
Ephesus, they would be gathering to sing the hymns and offer the prayers,
patterned after the Jewish synagogue of gathering, hearing God’s Words,
responding, and departing in joy. John recalls all of this until heaven
interrupts.

Visions
come. John sees the great conflict between good and evil, not as a
once-and-done battle, but as a cycle of maneuvers and responses. He does not
avoid the painfulness of life as we know it, where famine happens somewhere in
the world, where brutality all too frequently breaks out. But he sees also the
splendor of God’s throne in the center of all things. The door to heaven has
opened, the truth is fully known, and there is One seated upon the throne.

As
we move toward the end of the book, we begin to see the destination of where
all life is heading, at least the life that remains with God. God triumphs over
evil, even if we cannot see totally how God sifts everything out.

Then
John looks, and he sees a city fall out of the sky. It is the New Jerusalem. It’s
not the Old Jerusalem. It resembles it, but it is infinitely new, polished and
gleaming. It is far more glorious than any city on earth. No garbage blowing
down the street, no dark alleys, no homeless poor looking for hope. John goes
to great lengths to describe this city full of precious jewels, some so
precious that the words don’t translate well from Greek into English.

The
prophet strains to describe what he sees in his vision. It is an extraordinary vision.
As John sees this, takes it all in, as he sees the shining city coming down
from heaven, the New Jerusalem, he discovers there is no temple in the heart of
the city. How curious! For Jerusalem was always defined by its temple. Surely John
would know that, particularly given how much of the Jewish scripture he quotes
as he describes his visions. Revelation is full of lines from the Psalms and
the prophets, all woven into a fresh tapestry of praise. The praises of God
spoken through the centuries are revisited and claimed, the same praises that
Israel sang in its temple. But there is no temple to generate the music, no
temple to employ the priesthood, no temple to officiate over sacrifices that might
bring people closer to God. There is no temple as the meeting place of God and
humanity. No temple at all.

This
may seem a curious omission. It will take imaginative energy for some of us
church folk to chew on this and digest it. Ever since our birth, and a good
time before it, churches have their structures. Congregations have their
buildings. The buildings require care and attention. They become the means by
which people gather, whether in simplicity as in this Calvinistic meeting house
or in high cathedrals filled with art, incense, and precious metals.

“We
must have a temple,” isn’t that right? That has long been the mantra for the Presbyterian
establishment. As our forebears proliferated across the continent, moving
slowly as Presbyterians usually do, they established a temple of sorts in every
town they could. Some of these temples are quite impressive. Think of some of
the great congregations you have known. They have enormous buildings. I love
every time I go to 55th and 5th in New York, and wander
into Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, right across the street from Donald Trump’s
tower. I love the smell and feel of the wooden pews, or the high lofty pulpit
which stands ten steps above reproach. It all reeks of permanence and presence.
Songs from the saints have circled toward the ceiling like incense.

But
there will be no such structure in the New Jerusalem. No temple at all. May I
say that is a bit strange, particularly in situations that a lot of churches
are in? The congregation has dwindled to a precious few, but at least they have
their building. They will hang on as long as they can as long as they have that
patch of real estate. Go up and down Main Avenue in Scranton, there are lots
and lots of temples, in some neighborhoods one on every corner. Each temple
grounds them, situates them, declares they are somewhere, and the mission field
is right there, all around them. But we can also guess what it takes to keep
those structures going. It’s an enormous amount of work, and then there are the
utility bills.

It
used to be that Presbyterian churches had a separate group of trustees. They
governed alongside the elders. If the elders focused on heaven and its riches,
the trustees tended to earth and its liabilities: patching the roof, replacing
the boiler, re-striping the parking lot. Over the years, as elders and trustees
consolidated in many congregations, the church building and its needs have
continued to demand attention and resources.

I
recall the day that I first saw this building. The walls needed a coat of
paint, the sanctuary floor had harvest gold carpeting nearly thirty years old.
We had a building and grounds committee back then. It was one guy, and he had
stopped coming to church, because every time he came, somebody hit him with
some complaints. We had a sexton, a wonderful man, except that he couldn’t see
well enough to drive a car and his cardiologist had told to stay off ladders.
And we had a junk room back in the corner where Room 210 is now located. It was
filled chest-high with old curriculum, broken lampshades, filmstrips that we
had stopped using (anybody remember filmstrips?). When the day came when the
dumpster was brought in to clear out the junk room, one of the people
responsible for Christian Education was caught climbing into the dumpster to
pull things out.

I’m
talking about a temple. A temple takes a lot of effort, requires a lot of
money. One of our neighboring congregations, smaller than this one, is spending
five hundred thousand dollars on its building and another five hundred thousand
dollars on its pipe organ. They tell me it is going to be really, really
impressive. Maybe that will help to bring people in. Who
can say?

But
there is no temple in God’s future. Isn’t that an unusual declaration? The
Building and Grounds committee would say, “Hallelujah! We don’t have to have
any more meetings!” The funding people would say, “Hooray! We don’t have to
raise any more money for the temple.”

So
what is John saying to us? What is he pointing to? Those of you who are racing
ahead in your minds know exactly what he can see. There will be no more temple
because a temple is the meeting ground between people and God, and God’s
presence is mediated to the people. The temple is where people congregate,
where they gather together to worship and learn, where they embody Christian
faith as a communal faith. Yet when all is said and done, when God comes close
to God’s own people, there will be no need for a temple. God in Christ is that
temple.

In
his earthly ministry, Jesus said as much. In the Gospel of John, he points to
himself and says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
Christian people hear him say “three days,” and they know he is speaking about
the temple of his body. But when he said it, he had just gone into the Old Jerusalem
temple, turned over the tables of the money-changers and swept out the
merchants. All the religious enterprises and rummage sales are not the reasons
we come to church any way. We come to church to encounter the Living God.
Church is what points us to God. Temple is what points us to God. And if it
does not point us to God, it is taking up valuable real estate.

John
sees a day when there is no temple. He does not say that to declare the temple
is unimportant; oh no, we would not know about God without it! But he does see
the day coming when God and people will be in complete peace and harmony with
one another. And it will come, not because the people have worked at it, but
because God will step over everything that separates his people from himself.

Now
perhaps there are some people who are so ready for this day to come that they
have stopped coming to church, especially when the weather is nice. “I don’t
need to worship God indoors; I can worship God by the trout stream or on the
fourteenth fairway or in the park.” Fair enough; and churches can spend far too
much time inside when there is a beautiful world to enjoy and a hurting world
to serve.

But
John points us beyond all this, when there is no intermediary between heaven
and earth. In God’s future, there is no Bible for God’s will is completely revealed;
the Bible we have points us to that future. In God’s future, there are no more
mission projects, because all of God’s work will be accomplished. There will be
no more church structures, whether buildings or organizations or budgets or
worship bulletins, for they won’t be necessary any more. They will be revealed
for what they always were: provisional demonstrations of God’s Kingdom, signs
of what will really truly come.

Imagine
a church-less temple or a temple-less church. In the meantime, there are some
experiments here and there. Our national Presbyterian family is trying to
ignite a 1001 new worshiping communities, communities of people who gather
around Jesus Christ as it once was, before it was structure, building, and big
business. They bring people together to worship and learn in the invisible
presence of God. One of my favorites is a small creative community in
Pittsburgh. It began in a tattoo parlor, where people who are heavily pierced come
to hear about the One who was pierced on the cross for them.

I
don’t know how I fit in, with my button-down shirt and suit jacket, in the
midst of all that ink. But they believe God is real, right there with them in
the grit of daily life. And after the worship songs die down, they welcome
everybody to a taco bar in the back of the room.

Imagine
a congregation that is not bound by walls, a group of Christian people who
gather for Someone greater than bricks and mortar. For them, the cornerstone is
not 1912, but Jesus Christ, alive again since 33 A.D. We live in the promise
that we will see him face-to-face, just as we come around his table this day. God
will be completely with us, and we will be completely with God. And every
faithful act we do here and now is a rehearsal of what is to come.

Some
time back, our church had a deacon named Mark. He was a faithful man, going
every couple of weeks to visit an older woman named Elsie. She had outlived her
family, so Mark became her family. She could not get out of her home, so Mark
took her whatever she needed. She could not get out to church, so Mark took church
to her.

One
day he phoned and said, “It’s time for Elsie to have communion. Her health has
been a little shaky, and I think we need to go.” We put a date on the calendar.
The day came, we met in the parking lot and drove over to the facility where
she now lived. When we arrived, however, we were met at the door by someone who
told us Elsie had just died. It was completely unexpected. I’m standing there
at a loss for words, the tray of bread and grape juice in my hands. I was in
shock. About all I could stammer out in my awkwardness was, “But we have come
to give her communion.”

Mark
turned with a smile and said, “Bill, it’s OK. Right now she is tasting the Real
Thing.”